This is not written as, nor intended to be, an academic work. No
particular care has been exercised to ensure that the ideas and proofs
presented therein are unique in the literature. They are,
however, my own original thoughts and have been presented as such on
various internet forums for some time now without drawing any
objections.

With much of the knowledge of the world literally at our fingertips, it
has never been easier to write a document like this and have it turn out
reasonably accurate. For example, if one is typing along and wishes to
know the volume of the ocean, or the surface area of the earth, or the
likely number of species, one can generally discover these numbers (all
used in constructing arguments in the text) in a matter of seconds
without leaving one's chair or moving one's hands from the keyboard.
When writing about something like the Bible, it helps enormously that
every important revision of the Bible is available instantly online, and
that some of these revisions are critically annotated, that one can
readily discover the dates of the Bronze versus Iron ages (and review
the evidence that leads scholars to assign them), one can discover the
estimated life expectancy at various times and in various cultures of
the ancient and modern world and so much more, all a mere click away.

I would therefore like to acknowlege the Internet itself as the
emerging superorganismal brain of humanity, one that reasons by rational
consensus, that amplifies all of our own individual talents, knowledge,
and abilities, granting the least of us a greater reach and command of
facts and the arguments of the past than the most brilliant of the
pre-1980's modern academics, philosophers, and visionaries.

In this brain, Google is surely its functional core, and Wikipedia its
collective, ever-growing, ever-changing, memory, and I would like to
thank both of them just for existing. There are undoubtedly many people
who have received Nobel Prizes who didn't deserve them, but the creators
of the Internet, Google, and Wikipedia in particular do, as together
they have already done more to bring about World Peace in a rational
world than the entire Holocene's worth of politicians. The truth will
indeed set the world free, given time. The poorest villages in the
world, if they have an internet connection and functioning web
interface, have immediate access to the knowledge of the world, a
circumstance that is creating a quiet revolution already but whose full
impact will not be felt for another twenty years, when the generation
that grew up with this access comes of age.

I would also like to acknowledge my heavy use of my personal favorite
online Bible (and Quran, and Book of Mormon, and more) - the Skeptics Annotated Bible website. Every member of the Abrahamic
religions owes it to the ideal of truth to visit this site, begin
with Genesis, and work their way through the Bible, the Quran, and
the Book of Mormon, reading carefully the annotations and applying their
critical faculties to what they read. They should force themselves to
read the collected absurdities, inconsistencies (places where the
Bible contains exact, polar opposites of many of its most popular
assertions, so that one can ``prove'' a thing and its opposite by
selective quotation with the greatest of ease), instances of God
behaving violently, immorally, cruelly, instances of sexual
description and discrimination, contradictions of known science and
history, and much more, to get a clear idea of just how much of
the Bible (and Quran, and Book of Mormon) is nonsense by the
simple standard of using your common sense and your innate moral sense
to judge it, rather than applying a dishonest uncritical credulity
to its assertions and pretending to ``believe'' that the impossible is
somehow still true.

Whenever writing an article such as this that directly attacks the
superstitious belief systems of a large fraction of the world's
population, one always risks offending friends or acquaintances (or
perfect strangers!) that subscribe to those beliefs and don't like them
being called superstitions. All that I can say to these individuals is
that in general you do not hesitate to call all of the other
superstitious belief systems that have been used at one time or another
by their proper name, and so you should not really object so much when
your own is called by what it is by somebody else. To many a Christian,
a polytheist Hindu is a superstitious peasant, a Wiccan believes in
nonsense, an islander that has made a religion out of wrecked world war
II planes is an object of ridicule (however politely they might speak in
the presence of one). Christian culture speaks openly of Norse and
Roman and Greek and Persian and Native American and Indian and ancient
Sumerian mythology. The same is generally true in the opposite
direction as well, of course - the Muslim considers the Christian
deluded, the Jew considers Christianity and Islam alike to be complex
heresies, the Hindu thinks all three are nonsense, all four of these think that you have to be batshit crazy to be a Mormon because it
is obvious that its ``sacred text'' is just superstitious fantasy
dreamed up by Joseph Smith in a process no different from what we see
played out in modern times by prophet wannabes in places named Waco and
Jonestown , but without visiting congressmen or the FBI.

Wikipedia, of course, maintains an entire page with a list of Messiah
claimants including Koresh, and my personal current favorite, Wayne
Bent1. Is there
anyone alive who doesn't realize that nothing separates Wayne Bent from
Jesus or any other cult figure of any other time but modern skepticism,
one count of criminal sexual contact with a minor and two counts of
contributing to the delinquency of a minor?

So lighten up. There is really nothing that separates your own
superstitious belief from that of Wayne Bent and his followers but a few
hundred years (time for the facts to be lost in the mist of time and
obscured by the myths and legends), tradition, and the fact that you
were raised to turn off your critical faculties when considering
your own faith, however intact they remain for everybody else's.